Action Movie FX

Hollywood movie magic – it can fill a night sky up with stars to backdrop a lover’s stroll or it can rain hellfire missiles down on smart phone captured videos of your friends.

We prefer the latter. 

Action Movie FX adds special effects, including but not limited to hellfire missile attacks, to movies you shoot with your smart phone.

Share the edited videos with your friends via e-mail or Facebook.

Sitegeist

Sitegeist utilizes data from a number of sources – US Census, Yelp, Foursquare,  Weather Underground – to tell you all about where you are (or places you’re interested in).

The app displays infographics about the area’s household incomes, gender makeup, commuting habits, best restaurants, age and price of homes and the number of children under 5-years-old. 

Stitcher

Stitcher is your radio on demand app.

The app lets you browse podcasts, tune in to live radio stations and play segments from already-aired radio shows. 

Stitcher also aggregates a list of the most listened to podcasts and radio segments of the day, and puts together a daily news roundup.

Stitcher makes it very easy for the radio and podcast fan to access their favorite programs and find new ones.

Pepperplate

This recipe app does three things we love:

1) To import a recipe from the internet, all you have to do is input the URL – Pepperplate scrapes all the steps.

 2) Creates a grocery list, ordered by recipe or grocery aisle. 

3) The iPad app will set timers based on the recipes and allows for multiple timers to help manage multiple recipes. 

You can also schedule your meals using Pepperplate’s calendar, though it won’t sync with your personal calendar app. 

Portable

Portable is a portable table app for playing games.

The app when opened on an iPad displays the green felt of a card table. Players choose their game item from an inventory, a set of either 32 or 52 cards, dominos or dice, and the selected item drops onto the card table.

The dealer can shuffle the deck or manipulate the dominos or dice any way they want. 

The game gets really cool when passing cards, dominos, or dice between players. 

Each player’s iPhone is connected to the iPad via Bluetooth. There is a strip of colored light at each end of the iPad table and at the top of the table displayed on the players’ iPhones. By dragging a card across the iPad table and through one of the colored strips, the card suddenly appears on the iPhone display with the corresponding color.

The system takes some getting use to, but it allows for the closest virtual simulation to real card, domino, and dice games on an iPad or iPhone yet.

Trainyard Express

Trainyard Express is a maddening brainteaser. The point of the game is to build a track to guide the red colored train into the red colored station. Seems easy? It is.

Until you progress through the game and you’re told to guide red, blue, and yellow trains to their respective stations. And then you’ll see a purple station, but you only have a red and blue train. It gets worse. There will soon be an orange station, a green station, and a brown station.

The game is addictive. Once you solve each puzzle, you can upload the solution to trainyard.ca and view how others solved the puzzle.

We’re all aboard. 

Cut the Rope

Each level of this game involves a piece of candy tied to the end of a rope and an adorable little green creature with huge eyes and a goony, four-toothed smile. 

He’s hungry. He wants the candy. You need to get him the candy by cutting the rope, sometimes multiple ropes, so the candy falls right into his mouth.

Don’t let the cuteness factor (and it is very cute) dissuade you. The game is tricky and gets even trickier after you buy the full version. There are spiders, bubbles, and spike walls and they all can ruin Om Nom’s chance of feeding his sweet tooth. 

Instagram

Instagram is not a hipster app anymore. It’s too mainstream. But the reasons it became so tragically popular to the hip make it a great app for the majority of us. 

 Instagram lets its users snap a photo with their smart phone, add a filter to change how the image looks, and share it with Instagram’s online community – a great way to let your friends see (literally) what you’re up to.

The filters can make the image look retro if you’re into that, but they can also make the image sharper, give it greater detail, and improve the composition overall.

If you want to keep the photo as you took it, no sweat. You can upload unedited shots, too.

Fantastical

Fantastical is that substitute for Apple Calendar you wanted, but balked at because of the $3.99 price tag. Take it from us, Fantastical is worth it.

Fantastical’s greatest feature is that the user can add events naturally. Instead of filling in a number of information fields, simply type out the event details (or use your voice if you’re on an iPhone 4S and up) and Fantastical does the rest.

“Friday evening work party at Olive Garden” – Fantastical fills out the date, guesses a 6 p.m. start time, location and description fields automatically.

The calendar display is more attractive than Apple’s, too. A swipe motion changes between week and month views. Little dots, in colors based on their respective calendars, mark the number of events that day.

Fantastical syncs with iCloud  and Google calendars and can subscribe to others without much fuss. 

Pandora

Pandora has been Internet royalty for some time, but don’t discount the platform because it’s old.

It is still the best way to listen to tailored-for-you radio stations on your smart phone for free.

Enter a song or artist name and Pandora plays back similar songs and artists. The user can thumb-up or thumb-down the song and Pandora hones the station to your tastes based on your vote.

Pandora is a mainstay for all smart phone users. 

Flashlight

Because you never know if that shape moving in the darkness nearby is a python coiling around your child, it’s best to have a flashlight app to make your fears visible and blind the beast. 

Simply titled, Flashlight does just that, flash light. Users can control brightness and select a constant or pulsating light.

The app also displays a compass and can be set to signal an SOS.

Other apps include features like police lights, colored lights or a strobe, but those overcomplicate things. 

Dictionary.com

Dictionary.com’s app searches for those hard to know words fast, with or without network connectivity.

Users can save – aka "favorite" – words for later perusal, share word definitions through Twitter and Facebook, or look up synonyms of the word using Thesaurus.com.

But Dictionary.com is first and foremost a dictionary app and it works very well to that end.

Gmail

Google adapts its popular web and Android phone-based mail application to Apple and, again, outshines the iPhone’s native app, Mail.

Gmail on iPhone is beautiful. The text is less bulky than in Mail, making it easier for the user to differentiate between the recipient and subject text when scrolling through the inbox.

Swiping the inbox from the left side of the screen brings the Gmail menu into view. From here, viewing a specific folder or even switching to an entirely different account (without signing out) is one click away. 

The only feature lacking in Gmail that Mail has is a swipe-to-delete option. Gmail uses the swipe function to archive messages. Users have to check a tiny box next to each message they want to delete and then click the trash can icon.

Google Search

For those of who type your search queries to Google in that tiny little search bar on the upper right of the Safari browser app on your iPhone, I have one question: Why?

Who wants to squint to see and use their pinky finger to activate the Google search when you can download a much more powerful Google Search app?

The app uses Google voice recognition software to allow users to voice their searches. By many measures, Google’s voice recognition is better than Apple’s Siri.

The search app also comes with Google Goggles search. Simply point your phone’s camera at an object and snap a photo and Goggles analyzes the photo to bring you information about the object. 

Google Maps

The iPhone 5 was released without a nativeGoogle Maps app. Bad idea Apple.

The only thing louder than iPhone 5 users’ backlash against Apple’s decision to leave it out was the distant shouts for rescue coming from somewhere in the Australian outback – a location Apple Maps lead a number of its users to because of a bug in the software.

When Google Maps was finally allowed on the iPhone 5, it immediately became the No. 1 downloaded app in the App Store. And for good reason. 

Facebook

Facebook is on this list because, well, it’s unavoidable.

Data released last year showed that Facebook’s userbase spends more time on the site’s mobile version than its classic desktop version.

You’d be wise to follow suit. The app version is quick and clutter free while still offering much of the same functionality.

Facebook also released a Messenger and Camera app to allow for faster chatting and photo browsing

Khan Academy

Khan Academy is unbelievable, Bill Gates said in 2010. The online trove of more than 3,800 education how-tos was ported to the smart phone world early last year.

Users can browse 10- to 15-minute videos showing creator Salman Khan and others doodling away on a digital black board to explain subjects from making hexaflexagons to the stereochemistry of dienophile.

Khan Academy also features new videos that help explain issues the world faces today – like a four-part series on the Greek debt crisis or the introduction to the US social security system.

Khan Academy’s videos hosted on YouTube have received more than 200 million hits.

Cards

Cards is an app that combines the convenience of e-mail with the quaintness of old-fashioned snail mail.

Created by Apple, Cards lets you design and send greeting cards to anyone in the world without putting your phone down or licking a stamp.

Users can select from an assortment of themed or generic card templates, add customized text and a photo, and Apple will print out the design using a combination of letterpress and digital printing technology onto premium cardstock.

They’ll even put a stamp – a real, needs-to-be-licked stamp – on the envelope.

The service costs $2.99 for domestic recipients and $4.99 to send the letter abroad.  

Endomondo

There are many mapper apps that track your distance exercise and tell you how your average speed and time stack up against other runners, cyclists or skaters who took the same route.

But Endomondo is one of two that lets you watch your friends’ route progress in real time. Then if they’re struggling to keep up with your time, or maybe close to beating it, Endomondo lets you talk to them over the phone. No, really – type them a message through Endomondo’s online site and it will be transmitted and read aloud by Endomondo’s in-app coach.

Endomondo’s interface is designed with large buttons that are easy to tap. Users can choose from a number of exercises including running, cycling, kayaking, and rowing.

Social exercise is a big part of Endomondo’s offerings. Users can search for nearby routes that were completed and uploaded by others and race against the best time for that route. Their website has dozens of sponsor- and user-created challenges to undertake.

Unfortunately, Endomondo’s route making capabilities are limited. In competing applications, like Strava, users can edit completed runs into segments. They can not only see their average speed during a short sprint versus a maddening climb, but also can upload the segments and invite others to race them

. 

Tripit

Planning a vacation is stressful. Each step to get to and from that equatorial paradise or northern snow retreat requires juggling ticket receipts, flight confirmation numbers, and directions to the hotel. Have you looked up from your travel documents since you entered the airport? While you double-checked your boarding time, did you realize Terminal C veered to the left one walking escalator ago?

It’s not your fault. Well, it is. You could have prevented all the trouble with an app called Tripit.

Tripit syncs with your inbox and scrapes data off incoming travel confirmation e-mails. The app can tell if that car rental is for your summer vacation to Ireland and will combine it with your morning flight time to Dublin and your hotel check-in time later that afternoon in Cork. Already booked a dinner reservation at Fenns Quay?

And all this information is scraped from your inbox and displayed in chronological order on a single, easy to read list.

Certain travel vendors, like Avis car rental, can even import your itinerary data and use it to tailor their service for your schedule.

Each step of your trip is listed and interactive. With one click, Tripit displays all the information on your boarding pass. Lost in the airport? A terminal and gate number map is one click away.

Tripit can share this information with your calendar app as well to allow for better planning weeks before t-day (travel day).

Tripit’s only downside is the data-scraping algorithm can be fussy. Certain e-mail formats, like the format you’ll receive if a friend e-mails their trip to you through Priceline.com, aren’t entirely readable.

But Tripit allows users to manually add travel info in the rare event that the program leaves information out. 

For the price of free, Tripit gives its users a way to make travel enjoyable. 

Apple iphone 6

Hi Friends Here We Can See the new latest invention of Apple product that is iphone version 6 

• It has better Performance than iphone 5
• very Slim,awesome style
• It has dual projectors (1.output,2.Input)
• The output screen Projector displays the entire screen of the phone
• The input screen projector displays the keyboard (Apple keyboard)
• In input screen projector we can type,play games,etc
• See the Below Video for More exiting features...stay connected with this blog for more uploads.

Use folders

Take a moment to download a thousand or so apps to your phone. Finished? You may notice that the number of possible screens has maxed out at eleven, allowing for a maximum of 220 apps on an iPhone 5, and 176 apps on earlier models. It's not as though the thousands of other apps that you just bought never made it on to your phone; it's just that you have to search for them, which can be a bummer.

Want to increase the limit? Use folders. Simply press and hold an icon until all the icons start jiggling. Then drag that jiggling icon on top of another jiggling icon, and the two apps will be grouped together into a folder. Press the home button to save your changes.

On an iPhone 5, each folder can hold up to 16 apps, which means that if you put every app in a folder you can display up to 3,520 apps over 11 pages, plus another four in your spotlight. On the earlier models, the folder limit is 12, making for a maximum of 2,112 apps, plus four in the spotlight bar.

Can you push this even further? Yes, by dragging folders to the four spots in your spotlight dock, making for a total of 3,600 apps on the iPhone 5.

Even if you're not a deranged app hoarder, you still might find folders useful for grouping together similarly-themed apps.   

You can name the folders whatever you like. (Screenshot)

Tap to focus the camera

The autofocus feature on the iPhone is pretty good, with its ability to pick out faces and adjust the white balance and exposure to focus on them. But as magical as this technology may seem, it's no substitute for human touch.

Let's say you're snapping a photo of a woman showing off her engagement ring. You'll want to focus on the subject's ring, not necessarily her face. Your phone's autofocus will dutifully draw a box around the fianceé's face, and leave the ring relatively blurry. But, if you tap on the ring on your phone's screen, the focus will shift.

This works particularly well when shooting video. As you film, simply tap on whatever you want the camera to focus on.

The camera will automatically focus on a person's face. Tap on another object on the screen to focus on it instead. (Staff)

Take better pictures with HDR photography

As convenient as smart-phone photography may be, there’s one key weakness: Few phones offer exposure settings. This leads to problems when dealing with harsh light and heavy shadow.

Take a look at these two images. The left photo was taken without “high dynamic range,” or HDR. The brick walkway looks great, but the camera lost a lot of detail in the bright and dark areas. The sky looks washed out. The flowers seem lost in shadow.

A professional could repair this image with editing. But HDR tries to fix the image as it's being taken.

With HDR on, a phone will snap three photos in rapid succession. Each image uses a different exposure level. One shot is tuned for dark areas, such as the flowers in the image above. One captures the bright spots, such as the sky. The third goes for the mid-tones, much like the non-HDR photo.
After it snaps all three photos, the iPhone tries to identify the best aspects of each shot and stitches them into a single image.

While the final product is rarely perfect, it's often much better than the original – with no extra work required. If you're unhappy with the results, the iPhone actually saves two images: the HDR version and the shot it would have taken without the feature.

Turn on HDR from the iPhone's standard camera application by clicking "Options" then sliding the HDR toggle.

Better exposure: Without 'high dynamic range' (left), details are lost in the shadows of this scene. With HDR (right), you see more of the flowers and flag. (Ann Hermes/Staff)

Use your earbuds to take a photo

Suppose you want to take a photo of yourself, but the "arms-length self pic" isn't working out for you. Just plug in your earbuds (to the phone, not your ears), aim the camera, and press the volume-up button to snap the photo. This method also works well when you need to take a steady shot.

Apple's new EarPods (AP)

 

Create an 'app' out of a website you visit often

If you visit a website often, you might just want to put an icon on your home screen that takes you to the site with just one tap.

Here's how to do it: Visit the Web page in Safari and tap the "Go To" button at the bottom of your screen. It looks like a rectangle with an arrow coming out of it. A menu will pop up. Click "Add to Home Screen" and give the icon a name.

Tapping "Add to Home Screen" will create an app-like button. This way, you can revisit your favorite websites with a single tap. (Screenshot)

Turn an e-book into an audio book

To accommodate the visually impaired and the dyslexic, the iPhone has a feature that reads aloud text that appears on the screen. If you want to hear a book that you purchased from Apple's iBookstore, go to Settings > General > Accessibility, and turn on VoiceOver. The voice sounds like Siri, and you can alter her tempo, pitch, and other settings.

Once you turn on VoiceOver, an iPhone can read ebook aloud. (Screenshot)

Unfortunately, this feature doesn't seem to work with the iOS Kindle app.

Use your earbuds to manage calls

Let's say you're rocking out to Blue Öyster Cult's "Revölution by Night," and a call comes in. To answer it, just press the center button on your earbuds. To decline it, hold the button down for two seconds, and it will send the caller to your voice mail.

With Apple earphones, you answer a call without removing the phone from your pocket. (Screenshot)

What if you're already talking on the phone and another call comes in? Click the center button to put the first call on hold and answer the second. Press it one more time to hang up on the second call and return to the original one.

. Control audio playback with your earbuds

Your iPhone's earbuds – excuse me, EarPods™  – are more than just a device for listening to audio. They also allow you to pause, skip, and rewind your music. Here's how:

Play or pause – Click the center button once to start or stop a song. If you're not already midway through a song, pressing the center button will cue up a random tune from your library.

Skip a song – Press the center button twice quickly.

Go to a previous song – Press the center button three times quickly.

Fast-forward through a song – Press the center button once, then press it again and hold it down. Release the button when you reach the      desired section of the song.

Rewind – Press the center button twice, then press a third time and hold it down. As with fast-forward, release the button when you're done


     Apple's new EarPods (AP)

Use emojis

Why write, "I found your text message amusing," when you can send an image of a laughing smiley face? Why write, "Please remember to pick up an eggplant," when you can just send an image of an eggplant? And why write, "Our civilization's current overuse of natural resources bears striking parallels to that of the Rapa Nui people before their society's collapse," when you can just send an image of one of those Easter Island statues?

Because you don't have emojis installed on your iPhone keyboard, that's why . To correct this dreadful state of affairs , tap Settings > General > International > Keyboards. Then tap "Add New Keyboard" and select "Emoji."

You'll now see a globe icon to the right of the "123" icon on your keyboard. Tap it to access your emoji keyboard, and you'll be introduced to a vastly more efficient form of communication.

The iPhone comes with a whole set of icons. (Screenshot)

Type 'Mötley Crüe' with the umlauts in the right places

"Motley Crue" is a terrible name for a band. But "Mötley Crüe," with those orthographically unnecessary yet menacingly Wagnerian diacritical marks, is a great name. To properly refer to the World's Most Notorious Rock Band with your iPhone's keyboard, type a capital "M" and then hold down the letter "o" for a moment. Up will pop a bunch of O's with diacritical marks . Slide over to the umlaut. Now do the same with the "u" in "Crüe."

The iPhone will only let you place umlauts over vowels (including "y" so that you can write "Queensrÿche"). But fans of Spın̈al Tap will be disheartened to learn that you can't type a dotless "i" or an "n" with an umlaut.

This function also works for less sinister-looking accent marks, like the acute accent, the tilde, and the circumflex.

Now you can argue about rock legends with the correct diacritical marks. (Screenshot)